Adeel Mangi, Biden’s Muslim Court Pick, Rips ‘Senatorial Swamp’ That Sunk Him | EUROtoday

WASHINGTON — In the whole lot of Joe Biden’s presidency, there may be maybe no judicial nominee who endured extra partisan ugliness and unwarranted hostility than Adeel Mangi, the president’s choose for a U.S. appeals court docket seat.

Biden tapped Mangi, a veteran civil litigator in New Jersey, for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the third Circuit in June 2023.

Mangi checks all of the bins for a strong judicial candidate. He was unanimously rated “well qualified” by the American Bar Association. He was hailed for his authorized and professional bono work by teams together with the AFL-CIO and the Coalition of the Underrepresented Law Enforcement Associations, in addition to greater than a dozen Jewish teams.

Mangi additionally occurs to be Muslim. If he had been confirmed, he would have been the first-ever Muslim U.S. appeals court docket decide within the nation. He additionally would have tipped the ideological stability of this appeals court docket, giving it a good mixture of Democrat- and GOP-appointed judges.

But from the beginning of Mangi’s course of, Republican senators and darkish cash teams subjected him to a monthslong, disgusting smear marketing campaign. They baselessly tried to forged him as an antisemitic terrorist sympathizer. When that didn’t appear to stay — which was partly as a result of Jewish teams lined up in robust protection of Mangi — the GOP pivoted to a brand new line of assault: baselessly attempting to forged him as somebody who helps cop killers.

Their assaults on Mangi received so intense they scared off a handful of Democratic senators from supporting him as they eyed their reelection campaigns. Mangi’s nomination limped alongside within the Senate till final month, when Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) reduce a cope with Republicans to expedite votes on 9 of Biden’s district court docket nominees in trade for not voting on any of Biden’s 4 appeals court docket nominees.

After all the things he’s endured, Mangi’s nomination is over. He by no means even received a Senate vote.

In a Monday letter to Biden, Mangi supplied a uncommon and sobering tackle why his federal judicial nomination course of went the best way it did — and why he by no means received a good shot.

“This unfortunate fact remains: We have a fundamentally broken process for choosing federal judges,” Mangi wrote. “This is no longer a system for evaluating fitness for judicial office. It is now a channel for the raising of money based on performative McCarthyism before video cameras, and for the dissemination of dark-money-funded attacks that especially target minorities. Nominees pay the price — and so too does our nation.”

He warned that the brutal course of he went by means of will probably trigger different certified folks to assume twice about giving up profitable jobs to take an opportunity at changing into a federal decide.

“Who will give up the rewards of private sector success for public service, if the added price is character assassination and wading though a Senatorial swamp like this one?” Mangi requested. “This process must be reinvented to protect nominees from threats both reputational and physical in an era of Congressional dishonor where disinformation reigns and all decency has been abandoned.”

He added, “I set forth this record of my experience and my opinions so that this playbook will be recognized the next time a Muslim is nominated to a prominent position of service.”

A White House spokesperson didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.

Below is a duplicate of Mangi’s letter to Biden.